Saturday, December 13, 2014

A nation succumbs to emotional incontinence

I think it was the British psychiatrist
and writer Theodore Dalrymple who coined the term “emotional incontinence” to
describe mass displays of extravagant grief.

Dalrymple wasn’t referring to
the neurological disorder of that name, but a sociological phenomenon that was
first noted in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death.

On that occasion the
traditionally stoical British public indulged in an uncharacteristic outpouring
of mawkish sentimentality, gathering in the streets to weep on each other’s
shoulders at impromptu shrines decorated with teddy bears. (Why teddy bears?
You tell me.)

Until recently, that public grief-fest
stood as the high-water mark of emotional incontinence. But astonishingly,
Australians may have outdone the Brits with their reaction to the death of the
cricketer Phillip Hughes.

I say “astonishingly” because
Australia likes to think of itself as tough and resilient; a larrikin society
where hard men in the tradition of Ned Kelly, Jimmy Spithill, Steve Irwin, Dennis
Lillee and the fictional Crocodile Dundee spit in the eye of adversity.

But now the secret is out.
Australia’s soft emotional underbelly has been exposed.

Hughes’ death not only
triggered an overblown media frenzy that continues almost unabated after two
weeks, but seemed to reduce some of his fellow players to gibbering wrecks. Who
would have thought Australian cricketers were so emotionally fragile?

Counsellors were working with
Australian teams, we were told. Some players might never pad up again.

So traumatised were the
Australian players that on the day before this week’s postponed test match against
India began, there was still doubt as to whether some would be fit to take the
field.

Most memorably, we saw the
Australian captain, Michael Clarke breaking down like an overwrought teenager.

“We must dig in and get
through to tea,” a quivering Clarke told mourners at Hughes’ funeral, in what
sounded suspiciously like a line composed by a PR hack to wring maximum
sentiment from the occasion.

We hear a lot these days
about PDAs – public displays of affection, usually involving celebrity couples,
that are criticised as exercises in attention-seeking. I wonder if intemperate public
displays of grief should be similarly discouraged.

Certainly, it’s hard to
escape the feeling that such displays are often less about the dead than the
living.

Deaths happen in sport – most
notably in motor racing, where fellow drivers do their grieving in private and move
on.

Strangely enough, I don’t
recall Australia’s jockeys being so psychologically damaged by the deaths of
two female colleagues in separate accidents in October, only weeks before the
Hughes incident, that they cancelled all riding engagements. Jockeys, like racing
drivers, must be made of sterner stuff than cricketers.

The grieving for Hughes
wasn't just excessive to the point of self-indulgence; it was hypocritical
too. As sports columnist Mark Reason pointed out in this paper, it was Michael
Clarke who told an English batsman last year, “Face up – get ready for a broken
f***ing arm”.

The Australian captain
clearly loves to indulge in macho sledging, enjoys pumping up the intimidation, but goes to pieces when a teammate dies as a direct result of gladiatorial
aggression on the field. Can he join the dots, or does his ego get in the way?

Of course social media had to
get in on the act too, with a mass exercise in dribbling self-pity called Put
Out Your Bats, the originator of which – a man so psychologically frail that he
burst into tears when he heard of Hughes’ death – was lauded in the Australian media
as a hero and a celebrity in his own right.

The Put Out Your Bats campaign
captured perfectly the spirit of the social media era. It required little of
its participants and achieved nothing beyond making them feel good for having
engaged in what they no doubt thought was some sort of profound communal act of
catharsis.

To be sure, Hughes’ death was
a tragedy – not so much because it robbed Australia of a great cricketing
talent, but because every life taken prematurely is a tragedy.

More than anyone, his family
would have been grieving, but significantly we heard virtually nothing about
them. It was all about the game and its cosseted, self-absorbed stars.

In the same week that Hughes
died, my wife lost a much-loved sister. She nursed her in her final days and
was with her when she breathed her last.

Bereavement didn’t leave my
wife in a state of abject helplessness. The day after we held a farewell
ceremony for her sister, she was back at work. That’s what people do in the
real world. They just get on with things.

3 comments:

This sort of thing seems to be encouraged these days - especially at secondary school where group crying seems to be the norm. I think my generation think that it's self indulgent and it is really. I recall calling in on a friend (who I thought was pretty emotionally tough) shortly after the death of Di and he was in tears. I was stunned and still am when I think of it. How much is the news media to blame for this? The cricketer was hardly out of the news for days and days after the accident....So much of our news-especially on TV isn't news any more just commercials for pop singers and various sporting figures-weird really especially when one of the TV1 news readers was reported as attacking Fox News for its poor news items!

Equally tragic for me and much more common is the requirement of public people (esp. sportsmen) to make a tearful apology on TV for an inadvertant quip or twitter or Facebook comment.

Equally repugnant is the false outrage expressed when someone says something that might malign a race, culture or gender. Of course the outrage deepens the closer the comment is to the truth or widely held belief.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.